“The Strange Years of My Life” by Nicholas Laughlin. Great Britain: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2015

…You find your feet at last
straying off the marl roads, the bauxite roads, the slaving
roads and the marooning roads, and you would be
turning now onto the singing roads and the sweeting
roads that lift you up to such a place
as cannot be held on maps or charts, a place that does not
keep still at the end of paths. Know this,
that lions who trod don’t worry bout reaching Zion. In time
is Zion that reach to the lions.

– Kei Miller, “In which the rastaman gives a sermon”

Trinidadian Nicholas Laughlin, editor of both Caribbean Review of Books and the culture and travel magazine Caribbean Beat, has released his first collection of poems, The Strange Years of My Life. His experience with literature, culture, and traveling has paid off in this debut, as he appropriates the “marooned roads” of his wide-ranging imagination. The ever-present attempt to map the origins and paths of the Caribbean people is carefully crafted into his poetry. As cleverly suggested in the painting Comparative View of the Heights of the Principal Mountains & c. in the World gracing the book’s cover, the reader will embark on a rather uncertain journey to places where “your accent is wrong and you discover you are Russian.” Forsaking the more traditional modes of Caribbean poetry, Laughlin’s work takes on another route, as if the GPS used to locate the meaning of self has been tampered with. His poems often take us on a spinning adventure, oscillating between past and present, in an accidental geography of migration across languages and destinations such as Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, and the Caribbean.
Maps become a commonplace in this collection. But these maps are not easy to follow. As an informed traveler should know, the reader must be cautioned that the trip ahead in The Strange Years of My Life is saturated with metaphorical references to things gone wrong, betrayals, mistakes, mistrust, terrible news, diseases/yellow fever, burned furniture, letters that take too long to arrive, and spilled milk. The landscapes portrayed by Laughlin are not beautiful; the reader must work hard to find their beauty and enjoy the dubious simplicity of poems whose stanzas at times can be only two lines long.
The excitement of traveling—similar in a way to reading poetry in flight–creates many expectations, so to start off the collection with a precautionary poem titled “Everything Went Wrong,” seems to prefigure that journey’s ups and downs. The first stanza is a warning:
Don’t mention my name in your letters.
Don’t write down my address.
In fact, better not write letters at all.
Better no one knows that you can write. (13)

Although the poem urges the initiate traveler to be suspicious, it also conveys a sense of a confounding state of mind. The reader is led to believe this poem is a riddle, not just in the stanza above, but for the rest of the poems in this collection; a riddle in which the clues may or may not decode the meaning. Despite this, for the most part Laughlin manages to keep the meaning concealed. In the interview “A Strange Conversation in Small Axe,” by Anu Lakhan, the poet is asked about the iteration of codes in his work. Laughlin says:”
“In code” suggests there’s a key the reader must find to unlock some hidden meaning. A poem’s meaning is the sound of the words and shape on the page, which aren’t hidden at all. “Code” suggests a deliberation of composition that doesn’t resemble my own experience of writing poems. For me, a poem begins with a state of mental drift through the world that is language. I see I’ve sort of asked for this line of questioning, considering how many of the poems talk about cryptics, riddles, clues, languages the various narrators and characters don’t entirely understand, and so on.

If the “codes” in the map-like poems in this collection are not clues to help decipher a concealed meaning, then the traveler-reader is left with nothing but mere assumptions. And if language is at the core of Laughlin’s work, then it should be taken for granted that these poems speak of the “unspeakable.” The impossibility of an emotion, of an action, of a persona in the poem then comes alive thanks to language. The language in these maps is deceitful, and its legends raise a red flag, as the poem cautions:
Don’t trust the maps: they are fictions.
Don’t trust the guides: they drink.
In this country there’s no such thing as “true north.”
Don’t trust natives. Don’t trust fellow travelers. (13)

Despite the poet’s use of the possessive pronoun “my” in the book’s title, Laughlin (who is also program director of the Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival), wants to ensure that no one thinks the poems are autobiographical. As is the case in “Les Argotiers,” he prefers to use aliases to conceal the identity of the persona: ““Dr. Janvier is my real name.”” In the poem “Bon Courage,” with the aid of antlike little elves who destroy any evidence, he erases any possible language-code that might trace it back to him:
Aha: so I suspected.
The maps are blank.
Ants have been at work.
Librarians have sat up through the night,
erasing.
And this is not a diary, acrobat.
Stop looking for my name. (33)

Thus, he deprives the reader of any certainty that can confirm these maps will lead back to the poet’s biography.
The most salient characteristic in Laughlin’s poems is his ability to challenge the reader with impossibilities. This is perhaps his hope, that his poems have the potential to create a distance between them and the readers “and with themselves and the author [himself].” Because of the barriers language might pose to the traveler, it is important to advise that Laughlin’s poems do not reach out well to non-educated or non-cultured audiences. That is the case of specific poems that require the reader to do further research to gain a fuller understanding of their literary or cultural references. Laughlin’s assertion that “Life is complicated and strange” is ably described in this collection. The poet admits to have been influenced by Romantic poet John Keats’ idea and Shakespeare’s practice of ‘negative capability.’ Elaborating on this influence, Laughlin states: “I’m drawn to the notion that [negative capability is ] equally relevant to the experience of reading. “Being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—that’s a good way to read poems.” Surrendering to the ‘mysteries’ is precisely the ‘missing’ clue to decode Laughlin’s poems: there is no clue. On closer inspection, the collection of poems proves to be intense, cloaked by his stylized use of uncertainties. Without doubt, his poems represent the anxiety between telling and concealing.
An air of negative capability maintains a steady breeze throughout the entire collection. For instance, the poem “Self-Portrait in the NeoTropics,” challenges the reader with cryptic lines such as: “Here I lack only the things I do not have.” And: “I miss only the friends I do not have” (26). Yet another instance of negative capability can be perceived in the poem “Je Vous Ecris Du Bout Du Monde”: “There are only twenty-nine hours in every day, only sixteen months in a year, I only have twelve lives. There is only one day in every day” (29). In these lines one can sense an acceptance of the ‘uncertainties and mysteries’ of human existence, addressing life’s riddles with other riddles.
Laughlin’s evident admiration of Keats and significant details of his short-lived life are evident throughout the collection, but most specifically in the poem “Mr. Keats Has Left Hampstead.” As the consumption-ridden English poet “scribbled notes to the bees” and “dropped little flags of paper about the lawn,” Laughlin goes on to describe the precarious state of Keats’ health: “tiny stars exploded in his lungs, / Rigel amd Betelgeuse, / tiny roses eating up his veins” (38). Keats’ romance with Franny Brawne also becomes the focus of the poem “News from Rome”:
The rumour that you are dead.
Limbs stitched into your bed.
The furniture chopped and burned.
Severn destroys the umpteenth draft of his letter.
A letter to London takes one month.
A letter to me takes 194 years. (39)

The above is based on Keats’ death in the arms of his friend and nurse Joseph Severn, who was also responsible for writing the letter of sad news to Franny—a letter that took one month to reach her in London. Thus, in a poetic collection full of riddles unsolved, Laughlin’s evocation of Keats offers the reader perhaps a key piece to unravel to some degree the uncertainties that permeate the collection.
When all is said and done regarding the poetic qualities of Laughlin’s effort in The Strange Years of My Life, the question remains as to the success of the project. Some readers may come away with a sense that the poems as such are too inwardly turned or cryptic or surrealistic to be satisfyingly accessible.  Others will welcome the cryptic strangeness of the collection as the expression of an important voice in the multicultural, multiethnic landscape that characterizes the Caribbean, and of which Trinidadian culture is a prime example. Indeed, poetry such as Laughlin’s may be seen by some as an aesthetic exercise of random thoughts and images that leaves the ‘uninformed’ or ‘unenlightened’ reader with little rope to establish connections. If this were the case, then Laughlin’s attempt to distance himself from the poems’ voice or persona would be a strategy that some ‘frustrated’ readers may wish to follow as well, albeit for entirely different reasons. Despite the undeniable poetic quality of some instances in this collection, the question regarding the poems’ ultimate social pertinence will remain open-ended to some. On the other hand, for some poetry enthusiasts the aesthetic rewards of The Strange Years of My Life will far exceed the required cultural homework. In his review of Vahni Capildeo’s debut poetic collection No Traveller Returns, Laughlin’s description of that poet’s work may equally apply to his The Strange Years of My Life. Like Capildeo’s book, Laughlin’s collection “offers a different kind of thrill, and demands its own kind of patience from its readers. Intricate, elusive, alternately confiding and concealing . . . . in a language as careful as playful, aware both of its limits and of its powers.” It will be up to each reader to determine how far deep into the imaginative landscapes Laughlin conjures she or he wishes to travel.

 

Yaniré S. Díaz Rodríguez is an adjunct professor with the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. She holds an M.A. in Translation from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Caribbean Literature from the same university.